Chapter 50

"If some mortal, born too soon,
Were laid away in some great trance - the ages
Coming and going all the while - till dawned
His true time's advent; and could then record
The words they spoke who kept watch by his bed,
Then I might tell more of the breath so light
Upon my eyelids, and the fingers warm
Among my hair. Youth is confused; yet never
So dull was I but, when that spirit passed,
I turned to him, scarce consciously, as turns
A water-snake when fairies cross his sleep."
- BROWNING: Paracelsus.

This was the letter which Sir Hugo put into Deronda's hands: -

TO MY SON, DANIEL DERONDA.

My good friend and yours, Sir Hugo Mallinger, will have told you that
I wish to see you. My health is shaken, and I desire there should be
no time lost before I deliver to you what I have long withheld. Let
nothing hinder you from being at the Albergo dell' Italia in
Genoa by the fourteenth of this month. Wait for me there. I am
uncertain when I shall be able to make the journey from Spezia, where
I shall be staying. That will depend on several things. Wait for me -
the Princess Halm-Eberstein. Bring with you the diamond ring that Sir
Hugo gave you. I shall like to see it again. - Your unknown mother,

LEONORA HALM-EBERSTEIN.

This letter with its colorless wording gave Deronda no clue to what was in
reserve for him; but he could not do otherwise than accept Sir Hugo's
reticence, which seeded to imply some pledge not to anticipate the
mother's disclosures; and the discovery that his life-long conjectures had
been mistaken checked further surmise. Deronda could not hinder his
imagination from taking a quick flight over what seemed possibilities, but
he refused to contemplate any of them as more likely than another, lest he
should be nursing it into a dominant desire or repugnance, instead of
simply preparing himself with resolve to meet the fact bravely, whatever
it might turn out to be.

In this state of mind he could not have communicated to any one the reason
for the absence which in some quarters he was obliged to mention
beforehand, least of all to Mordecai, whom it would affect as powerfully
as it did himself, only in rather a different way. If he were to say, "I
am going to learn the truth about my birth," Mordecai's hope would gather
what might prove a painful, dangerous excitement. To exclude suppositions,
he spoke of his journey as being undertaken by Sir Hugo's wish, and threw
as much indifference as he could into his manner of announcing it, saying
he was uncertain of its duration, but it would perhaps be very short.

"I will ask to have the child Jacob to stay with me," said Mordecai,
comforting himself in this way, after the first mournful glances.

"I will drive round and ask Mrs. Cohen to let him come," said Mirah.

"The grandmother will deny you nothing," said Deronda. "I'm glad you were
a little wrong as well as I," he added, smiling at Mordecai. "You thought
that old Mrs. Cohen would not bear to see Mirah."

"I undervalued her heart," said Mordecai. "She is capable of rejoicing
that another's plant blooms though her own be withered."

"Oh, they are dear good people; I feel as if we all belonged to each
other," said Mirah, with a tinge of merriment in her smile.

"What should you have felt if that Ezra had been your brother?" said
Deronda, mischievously - a little provoked that she had taken kindly at
once to people who had caused him so much prospective annoyance on her
account.

Mirah looked at him with a slight surprise for a moment, and then said,
"He is not a bad man - I think he would never forsake any one." But when
she uttered the words she blushed deeply, and glancing timidly at
Mordecai, turned away to some occupation. Her father was in her mind,
and this was a subject on which she and her brother had a painful mutual
consciousness. "If he should come and find us!" was a thought which to
Mirah sometimes made the street daylight as shadowy as a haunted forest
where each turn screened for her an imaginary apparition.

Deronda felt what was her involuntary allusion, and understood the blush.
How could he be slow to understand feelings which now seemed nearer than
ever to his own? for the words of his mother's letter implied that his
filial relation was not to be freed from painful conditions; indeed,
singularly enough that letter which had brought his mother nearer as a
living reality had thrown her into more remoteness for his affections. The
tender yearning after a being whose life might have been the worse for not
having his care and love, the image of a mother who had not had all her
dues, whether of reverence or compassion, had long been secretly present
with him in his observation of all the women he had come near. But it
seemed now that this picturing of his mother might fit the facts no better
than his former conceptions about Sir Hugo. He wondered to find that when
this mother's very hand-writing had come to him with words holding her
actual feeling, his affections had suddenly shrunk into a state of
comparative neutrality toward her. A veiled figure with enigmatic speech
had thrust away that image which, in spite of uncertainty, his clinging
thought had gradually modeled and made the possessor of his tenderness and
duteous longing. When he set off to Genoa, the interest really uppermost
in his mind had hardly so much relation to his mother as to Mordecai and
Mirah.

"God bless you, Dan!" Sir Hugo had said, when they shook hands. "Whatever
else changes for you, it can't change my being the oldest friend you have
known, and the one who has all along felt the most for you. I couldn't
have loved you better if you'd been my own-only I should have been better
pleased with thinking of you always as the future master of the Abbey
instead of my fine nephew; and then you would have seen it necessary for
you to take a political line. However - things must be as they may." It was
a defensive movement of the baronet's to mingle purposeless remarks with
the expression of serious feeling.

When Deronda arrived at the Italia in Genoa, no Princess Halm-Eberstein
was there; but on the second day there was a letter for him, saying that
her arrival might happen within a week, or might be deferred a fortnight
and more; she was under circumstances which made it impossible for her to
fix her journey more precisely, and she entreated him to wait as patiently
as he could.

With this indefinite prospect of suspense on matters of supreme moment to
him, Deronda set about the difficult task of seeking amusement on
philosophic grounds, as a means of quieting excited feeling and giving
patience a lift over a weary road. His former visit to the superb city had
been only cursory, and left him much to learn beyond the prescribed round
of sight-seeing, by spending the cooler hours in observant wandering about
the streets, the quay, and the environs; and he often took a boat that he
might enjoy the magnificent view of the city and harbor from the sea. All
sights, all subjects, even the expected meeting with his mother, found a
central union in Mordecai and Mirah, and the ideas immediately associated
with them; and among the thoughts that most filled his mind while his boat
was pushing about within view of the grand harbor was that of the
multitudinous Spanish Jews centuries ago driven destitute from their
Spanish homes, suffered to land from the crowded ships only for a brief
rest on this grand quay of Genoa, overspreading it with a pall of famine
and plague - dying mothers and dying children at their breasts - fathers and
sons a-gaze at each other's haggardness, like groups from a hundred
Hunger-towers turned out beneath the midday sun. Inevitably dreamy
constructions of a possible ancestry for himself would weave themselves
with historic memories which had begun to have a new interest for him on
his discovery of Mirah, and now, under the influence of Mordecai, had
become irresistibly dominant. He would have sealed his mind against such
constructions if it had been possible, and he had never yet fully admitted
to himself that he wished the facts to verify Mordecai's conviction: he
inwardly repeated that he had no choice in the matter, and that wishing
was folly - nay, on the question of parentage, wishing seemed part of that
meanness which disowns kinship: it was a disowning by anticipation. What
he had to do was simply to accept the fact; and he had really no strong
presumption to go upon, now that he was assured of his mistake about Sir
Hugo. There had been a resolved concealment which made all inference
untrustworthy, and the very name he bore might be a false one. If Mordecai
was wrong - if he, the so-called Daniel Deronda, were held by ties entirely
aloof from any such course as his friend's pathetic hope had marked out? -
he would not say "I wish"; but he could not help feeling on which side the
sacrifice lay.

Across these two importunate thoughts, which he resisted as much as one
can resist anything in that unstrung condition which belongs to suspense,
there came continually an anxiety which he made no effort to banish -
dwelling on it rather with a mournfulness, which often seems to us the
best atonement we can make to one whose need we have been unable to meet.
The anxiety was for Gwendolen. In the wonderful mixtures of our nature
there is a feeling distinct from that exclusive passionate love of which
some men and women (by no means all) are capable, which yet is not the
same with friendship, nor with a merely benevolent regard, whether
admiring or compassionate: a man, say - for it is a man who is here
concerned - hardly represents to himself this shade of feeling toward a
woman more nearly than in words, "I should have loved her, if - - ": the
"if" covering some prior growth in the inclinations, or else some
circumstances which have made an inward prohibitory law as a stay against
the emotions ready to quiver out of balance. The "if" in Deronda's case
carried reasons of both kinds; yet he had never throughout his relations
with Gwendolen been free from the nervous consciousness that there was
something to guard against not only on her account but on his own - some
precipitancy in the manifestations of impulsive feeling - some ruinous
inroad of what is but momentary on the permanent chosen treasure of the
heart - some spoiling of her trust, which wrought upon him now as if it had
been the retreating cry of a creature snatched and carried out of his
reach by swift horsemen or swifter waves, while his own strength was only
a stronger sense of weakness. How could his feelings for Gwendolen ever be
exactly like his feelings for other women, even when there was one by
whose side he desired to stand apart from them? Strangely the figure
entered into the pictures of his present and future; strangely (and now it
seemed sadly) their two lots had come in contact, hers narrowly personal,
his charged with far-reaching sensibilities, perhaps with durable
purposes, which were hardly more present to her than the reasons why men
migrate are present to the birds that come as usual for the crumbs and
find them no more. Not that Deronda was too ready to imagine himself of
supreme importance to a woman; but her words of insistance that he must
"remain near her - must not forsake her" - continually recurred to him with
the clearness and importunity of imagined sounds, such as Dante has said
pierce us like arrows whose points carry the sharpness of
pity -

"Lamenti saettaron me diversi
Cà che di piefermti avean gli strali?"

Day after day passed, and the very air of Italy seemed to carry the
consciousness that war had been declared against Austria, and every day
was a hurrying march of crowded Time toward the world-changing battle of
Sadowa. Meanwhile, in Genoa, the noons were getting hotter, the converging
outer roads getting deeper with white dust, the oleanders in the tubs
along the wayside gardens looking more and more like fatigued holiday-
makers, and the sweet evening ehanging her office-scattering abroad those
whom the midday had sent under shelter, and sowing all paths with happy
social sounds, little tinklings of mule-bells and whirrings of thrumbed
strings, light footsteps and voices, if not leisurely, then with the hurry
of pleasure in them; while the encircling heights, crowned with forts,
skirted with fine dwellings and gardens, seemed also to come forth and
gaze in fullness of beauty after their long siesta, till all strong color
melted in the stream of moonlight which made the Streets a new spectacle
with shadows, both still and moving, on cathedral steps and against the
façades of massive palaces; and then slowly with the descending moon all
sank in deep night and silence, and nothing shone but the port lights of
the great Lanterna in the blackness below, and the glimmering stars in the
blackness above. Deronda, in his suspense, watched this revolving of the
days as he might have watched a wonderful clock where the striking of the
hours was made solemn with antique figures advancing and retreating in
monitory procession, while he still kept his ear open for another kind of
signal which would have its solemnity too: He was beginning to sicken of
occupation, and found himself contemplating all activity with the
aloofness of a prisoner awaiting ransom. In his letters to Mordecai and
Hans, he had avoided writing about himself, but he was really getting into
that state of mind to which all subjects become personal; and the few
books he had brought to make him a refuge in study were becoming
unreadable, because the point of view that life would make for him was in
that agitating moment of uncertainty which is close upon decision.

Many nights were watched through by him in gazing from the open window of
his room on the double, faintly pierced darkness of the sea and the
heavens; often in Struggling under the oppressive skepticism which
represented his particular lot, with all the importance he was allowing
Mordecai to give it, as of no more lasting effect than a dream - a set of
changes which made passion to him, but beyond his consciousness were no
more than an imperceptible difference of mass and shadow; sometimes with a
reaction of emotive force which gave even to sustained disappointment,
even to the fulfilled demand of sacrifice, the nature of a satisfied
energy, and spread over his young future, whatever it might be, the
attraction of devoted service; sometimes with a sweet irresistible
hopefulness that the very best of human possibilities might befall him -
the blending of a complete personal love in one current with a larger
duty; and sometimes again in a mood of rebellion (what human creature
escapes it?) against things in general because they are thus and not
otherwise, a mood in which Gwendolen and her equivocal fate moved as busy
images of what was amiss in the world along with the concealments which he
had felt as a hardship in his own life, and which were acting in him now
under the form of an afflicting doubtfulness about the mother who had
announced herself coldly and still kept away.

But at last she was come. One morning in his third week of waiting there
was a new kind of knock at the door. A, servant in Chasseurs livery
entered and delivered in French the verbal message that, the Princess
Halm-Eberstein had arrived, that she was going to rest during the day, but
would be obliged if Monsieur would dine early, so as to be at liberty at
seven, when she would be able to receive him.